Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 3:38 pm Post subject: Something for you long term users to think about for newbies

Hi all

I am new to PicaJet ... but not new to photo organiser software nor digital photography, nor computers as I live on the thing .....

I have around 12,000 images.
I have just installed PicaJet.
I haven't used categories, tags, comments or anything YET.
I have a flickr album and have got the flickr plugin.

Where do I start?

There is no getting started guide with PicaJet that I can see. As I said, I know photo organiser software, it's just how do I go about knowing what I've already categorised, put comments on, etc, etc in PicaJet?

I could start by date I guess, oldest first? ... But there must be a great way of doing this. 12,000 is a lot to get through systematically.

Cheers all and happy thinking!

Marky_UK
ps: PicaJet coders - if there is a Getting Started Guide aimed at exactly what I need, then tell me where it is. If there isn't see the feedback on this, and slap it in the next build! It's imperative hehehe (he says soooo selfishly and smiling!)

Are you talking more of a guide to managing photo's, rather than a guide to picajet? If so I agree, as we've gone through the same learning process. Ironically robofolder came along just after we adopted a similar system.

One idea that would be good would be a tips and hints section, with some of the responses here in the forums.

Both really - but yes, never thought about it as a guide for photos only!

Is there any chance that the support guys could start a new section in the User Forum Index for "Using PicaJet and Managing Photos" or something like that, with a huge message telling people never to put errors about software and so on in it!!

Or we could just start some threads in here .. erm ... like this! doh!

I maybe haven't been very clear on what I need and where I am now.

I have about 12,000 photos in subfolders under one main folder.
The folders are named as per "album" really - original sense of the term.

So one for a particular holiday, one for all pictures taken at my parents, and so on.

I have NO TAGS on the photos
I have A LOT OF JUNK to clear out
I have a lot of RANKING to do

And there are 12,000 of them!

Where do I start? How do I do it? What processes do people adopt to go through such a quantity?

And yes, I could start from the first folder and work down. But then .... in more of answer to your question Andrew ... how does that relate to PicaJet? How do I know how "far I have got" with my cleanup exercise?

Maybe I could tag all photos as I clean them up with "cleaned" ... then later remove that tag from all.

I think some form of guide to managing photo's would be a good start, especially for Picajets developers as it ties in with Robofolder. There are a few good primers on the internet.

We have tried various options as our cameras improved and the files got bigger. Now we have a folder per year, then subfolders named by date with a small descriptive tag. We than categorise within Picajet as one day can see many types of image taken, and some can cover multiple categories. We tend to 'quality control' before we import into Picajet, discarding the crap.

Our current problem is that my wife bought a Minolta 5D DSLR which saves as RAW, and Picajets' support for tagging RAW files is bluntly crap. Read my other post.....

One other task we do is to archive to Fotki, which doesn't take RAW at all. However the Picajet/Fotki plugin does a superb job of converting to a large jpeg on the fly.

One last problem with help files, is that the team do seem to update on a regular basis so some things change, but enough is static that it should be a good basis.